Mali 'unable to confirm' receiving misdirected US military emails

By Al Mayadeen English
Source: Agencies
19 Jul 2023 10:37

Ambigiouty continues to surround misdirected sensitive US emails sent to Mali's domain.

Mali says it cannot confirm receiving sensitive US emails.

Authorities in Mali say they are unable to confirm that they have been receiving misdirected US military emails to their local web domain, a source in the Malian government told Sputnik.

"We have learned about US emails sent by mistake to the Malian domain, but we cannot confirm that we have received them." the governmental source told the Russian news agency.

The sources added that US authorities made no contact with their Malian counterparts over the issue.

On Monday, a report by the Financial Times revealed that millions of US military emails were misdirected to Mali due to a "typo leak" that revealed extremely sensitive information such as diplomatic documents, tax returns, passwords, and top officials' travel data.

The issue stems from users typing in the .ML domain, the country identifier for Mali, instead of the .MIL domain, the suffix to all US military email addresses, hence, misdirecting emails with sensitive information to Malian users.

Sabrina Singh the Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary in the US Department of Defense said that the Pentagon was aware of the continuous following of unauthorized messages and has implemented a policy to make sure that the emails are not misdirected again.

The report highlights various incidents in which US security and military personnel's carelessness led to the leak of sensitive information.

Emails are frequently misspelled by military travel agencies. Employees sending emails between their own accounts are another issue. One FBI agent with a naval background attempted to transmit six texts to their military email and inadvertently sent them to Mali. One of them was an urgent diplomatic communication from Turkey to the US State Department concerning possible operations by the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) against Turkish interests in the US.

When passing notes, one FBI agent frequently mistyped their own email, including a notice from the Turkish embassy in Washington on probable activity by a recognized terrorist group.

The same person also forwarded a series of briefings on domestic US terrorism marked “For Official Use Only” and a global counter-terrorism assessment headlined “Not Releasable to the Public or Foreign Governments.”

Gorman told the FT, "While it is not possible to implement technical controls preventing the use of personal email accounts for government business, the department continues to provide direction and training to DoD personnel."